17 August 2014

17th of August

Farm news
Crunching continues for Seti. RAC (recent average credit) has hit 70,000 and total credit has just passed 21 million. My new target is 25 million for total credit before I start cutting back.

I am slowly rolling out the new optimised Seti apps that I mentioned in the last blog post. For each machine I run the down the cache until they are out of work before installing them. I could just stop BOINC, install the apps and then start it up again but I would rather have a clean change over in case something is wrong. It takes about a day to run down the cache on the Intel-GPU machines. The Nvidia-GPU machines will be done last.

I am also noticing that there is a general shortage of work for Seti, probably due to the challenge running at the moment and all the extra computers. Quite often my machines will make work requests and get nothing. BOINC will retry but starts to back-off the requests if it keeps failing to get work.

The Parallella's picked up BOINC 7.4.13 today. I had one Parallella set up to define the Epiphany co-processor and the first thing it did when it came up was to make a scheduler request for some work for it. There wasn't any but at least the client can now request work for a user-defined co-processor. There still aren't any apps that can use the Epiphany at the moment.

The Parallella's are running 2 Einstein BRP tasks on the ARM cores. There isn't any BOINC app for Epiphany but the guys at Einstein are working on one. I have heard that there may also be a SETI app in the works.